A dispute over whether requiring a bank-fraud suspect to unlock her computer violates the suspect’s rights against self-incrimination has shifted after federal authorities got into the computer another way.

An attorney for Ramona Fricosu confirmed this morning that federal investigators have been able to unlock the laptop in question without Fricosu’s help. Detectives seized the laptop, which they argued belonged to Fricosu, during a search warrant but were unable to get into it because it was encrypted.

Earlier this year, U.S. District Court Judge Robert Blackburn ruled that Fricosu had to unlock the computer for investigators, over her objections that doing so would violate her 5th Amendment rights against self-incrimination. Fricosu’s attorney, Philip Dubois, had recently asked Blackburn to reconsider his ruling, in light of an 11th Circuit Court of Appeals decision in a Florida case that requiring a suspect to unlock a computer for a grand jury investigation violated that suspect’s 5th Amendment rights.

The debate in Colorado, though, is now up in the air.

Dubois wrote in an e-mail today that Fricosu’s co-defendant — Scott Whatcott, who is also her ex-husband — provided a list of possible passwords to investigators last month. Whatcott gave the passwords to investigators after the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver declined to review Blackburn’s decision.

Dubois wrote that Whatcott was apparently worried that Fricosu, with whom he has two children, could be sent to jail for contempt if she failed to unlock the computer. Dubois maintained, as he has before, that Fricosu may have forgotten the computer’s password or never known it.

“The government tried these passwords,” Dubois wrote, “and one of them was the right password.”

More information on the development is expected in a government court filing due Friday.

Fricosu and Whatcott are accused of bank fraud in connection with a mortgage scheme in the Colorado Springs area. The scheme targeted homes facing foreclosure, according to an indictment. Prosecutors alleged in a separate filing that the scheme defrauded banks of more than $900,000.

More in News

A member of a "sophisticated cocaine trafficking conspiracy" was convicted Monday in federal court in Denver of conspiring to distribute, and possessing with intent to distribute, five kilograms or more of cocaine, according to prosecutors.

A man who shot two eighth graders at Deer Creek Middle School in 2010, and was found not guilty by reason of insanity to attempted murder, will not be allowed to leave the Colorado Mental Health Institute's grounds without supervision, according to a Jefferson County District Court ruling.

After the San Francisco Bay Area, metro Denver experienced the biggest apartment rent increases this decade in the country. But plenty of new supply should put future rent gains closer to the national average, according to a new report from RealPage, a real estate research firm.